


Coffee Bandit

by pirategirljack



Category: 12 Monkeys (TV)
Genre: AU, Coffee, F/M, prompt
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2015-04-16
Updated: 2015-04-16
Packaged: 2018-03-23 07:42:47
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 790
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/3760144
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/pirategirljack/pseuds/pirategirljack
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Someone keeps stealing her coffee</p>
            </blockquote>





	Coffee Bandit

**Author's Note:**

  * For [SinEater_Danyi](https://archiveofourown.org/users/SinEater_Danyi/gifts).



Cassie blearily rubbed her eyes and shuffled out of her bedroom and into the kitchen. She'd set the automatic coffee maker to start perking right as her alarm went off, so that the enticing smell of fresh-brewed coffee could waft into her room and help her wake up. Cassie had never been good at waking up in the morning; even medschool couldn't change that. But coffee...coffee was some magical gift from the gods, and it could get her out of bed.  
She yawned as she reached the counter, and reached out for the carafe before she'd even opened her eyes...  
And found the carafe empty, despite the rich coffee smell still in her apartment.  
"What the--?"  
The warming plate was hot. The carafe was still wet. The filter was full of used grounds. But there was no coffee.  
"Son of a..."

The next morning, it was the same. The third morning, Cassie set her alarm for fifteen minute before the coffee went off, and watched it switch on, brew a full carafe--  
And then the window slid open and a long arm snaked in and stole everything in the pot, then whoever it was put the pot back, closed the window, and crept off.  
Cassie rushed across the room and threw the window up again, but the fire escape was abandoned as if no one had ever been there.  
"What the fuck," Cassie said. 

She locked her window--and the coffee bandit popped the lock and got in anyway. She got up early and he didn't show. She moved her machine and he somehow got all the way inside and back out again without her noticing while she was in the bathroom.  
Cassie knew she should just call the cops, but she had no proof, for one, and whoever the coffee bandit was, she'd never seen his face and he never damaged or took anything but the coffee. It became something of a game--and then a challenge.  
She moved the coffee maker to other rooms, and still he slipped in and back out without her noticing. And when it finally made it to her bedside table, somehow she didn't hear him in her own room--the man was practically a ghost--but she woke up to a single red rose in a pretty bud vase, and a fancy pastry on the bedside table next to the empty carafe.  
Cassie sniffed the rose and smiled to herself. There was no way he was just a thief.

For the next two months, every morning, her coffee went missing. Sometimes, something was left in its place--flowers, pastries, once, a ceramic kitten. And once, the morning after she'd heard a smash of glass in the kitchen and arrived in time to almost see who her bandit was, a new, bigger, more expensive carafe for her coffee maker, which she'd moved back into the kitchen.  
That night, when she set up the coffee maker for the morning, she thought about the glance of longish brown hair, a scruffy jaw, wide eyes in a sweet face. Not enough to describe him to a sketch artist, but enough that she at least had some idea of who he was.  
She set it to make twice as much coffee the next morning, and woke to a mug of her own, still steaming, with a dish of sugar and milk waiting next to it.

After another week of that, Cassie took her mug of coffee into the kitchen and found that her coffee bandit hadn't left her this morning. A man, taller than her, with wide shoulders and strong-looking hands, wearing jeans, work boots, and at least three shirts, stood as close to the window as he could get without being through it, looking nervous.  
"Good morning," he said, as if he was already rethinking the intelligence of this move.  
"Good morning," Cassie said back. "So you're my coffee bandit?"  
He laughed like he'd never thought of it that way, and had the grace to look embarrassed. "I--um. Well, it was a joke. At first. And then a challenge. And, um. Well. I started feeling bad. For taking all your coffee. For repeatedly breaking into your house while you were sleeping."  
He chanced a glance at her, flushed, looked away again, and held out another single rose. "My name's Cole. I live upstairs from you. My buddy Ramse, he said I should apologize, so I brought you all this coffee to replace what I stole." And he pulled a shopping bag full of packs of coffee off the porch and put it at her feet like an offering.  
"My name's Cassie," she said, far more charmed than she should be. "Pleased to meet you, Cole."

**Author's Note:**

> Danyi basically dared me to write this! Posted first on Tumblr, reposted here.


End file.
